Does walking on the graves offend the dead or the religious?

As a kid, I would often walk with my mother, grandmother and two sisters to ‘the grave’. The grave was that of my grandmother’s mother and her other daughter. The walk was just over a mile. I enjoyed it and the visit to the graveyard. The headstones were like books telling the story of the life that lay beneath.

My mother would often tell us to be careful where we walked as she did not want us walking on people graves. Some graves were unmarked.

In the book of Luke chapter 11, Jesus is massively sounding off to the religious and in his rebuke to them he says, “You are like unmarked graves which people walk on without knowing it.”

That may have thrown the Pharisees it threw me back all those years to the graveyard. My mind wondered did the notion not to stand on someone’s grave come from this quote?

This passage once again throws out the stereotype of Jesus being ‘all love’. The more you read Jesus the more you see he was far from stereotypical. To one person he would say one thing yet to another the opposite advice.

Have we stereotyped love believing it always has to be kind and cuddly? What if to shake us out of own self-righteousness it questions who we think we are by speaking words angrily yet clearly.

Again and again, we have to ask ourselves have we made what was free and accessible into a sophisticated operation that excludes people.

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